chapter one

ok, so gail and i are sitting on oprah's stage, made-over in the very subtlest of ways...with nice outfits and professional make-up...nothing poofy or rude..........and oprah turns to me and asks.....so how did you meet your millionaire friend gail?.....................i guess it all goes back to lisa......one of the waitresses we hired to get us through the very first day.............she either answered the ad, or knew joyce....i really don't remember............but early on we decided that we needed an extra person, and lisa said that she knew somebody................now lisa was wound tight, in the classic typecast of hattie mcqueen in gwtw..........she would talk a mile-a-minute....and say absolutely nothing..........and she seemed unable to think outside the box.......at the time we did not have a liquor license, and it was customary for people dining uptown to 'bring their own'..........we were unsure how to handle these bottles.......we had a corkscrew, but it was unclear as to whether our waitstaff could legally open a bottle, or if we could simply supply the corkscrew to a table with the glasses and pretend that we did not know what the guests planned to do with these items.............a table of four came in with a nice bottle of red, and began to hand the bottle to lisa to open.....the litterally threw her hands up in the air and jumped backwards.......Shrieked, and said that she could not touch their bottle for fear of losing her job...................all i could thinkabout the story when i heard it was ...i don't know nothin about opening wine bottles...........anyway...........lisa introduced us to gail...where lisa was all drama..........with her hair, her over-the-top nails, her family problems, her shrill voice........gail was so laid back as to be a slow burn................she was slow to react, slow to anger.......and so personable as to be just like family from the get-go............and then there was the figuring out just what we had in common...............at first, i found out that i had worked with one of her sisters, eartha, at the hosital for the past 18 years................they had a vague resemblance.......so that was easy..........i also think that i had met her mother in some professional capacity..............but that was not the biggest revelation................at the time trc was not open for dinner unless a private party was booked......we would create a custum menu for the group.....often paid for by a drug company rep....who brought beer and wine.......and worried over taking home the leftover shrimp cocktail..............typically such events lasted as long was the alcohol lasted............giving the lowly kitchen help time to chat whilst serving up plates or running dishes through the machine................yes.....gail has three children.....no, she had never married their father, despite the longterm relationship..............she referred to him as jimmy two.............which reminded me of someone i had worked with at the hospital in the kitchen..........she called her husband two-ly...............gail shrieked..........................just like lisa, only with more emotion.........i was wondering when you would figure that out.........................here is the bottom line.........my friend sheila had been married to jimmy two sometime before/during/after the time that gail had 3 daughters with him...............and...at the time we were speaking, gail was dating the man who fathered a child with another person i worked with in the kitchen named valerie..............whoooooooo...this was almost too much to be revealed at one time........................sheila has since been divorced from jimmy two and married a white man who fathered her child, then killed himself by shutting himself in his garage with a running vehicle..........though the family denied that it was intentional.........it happened to occur just when sheila threatened to divorce him.................according to gail, sheila now lives in lexington, had gained substantial girth, and is quite settled...................anyway....back to my friend gail....................we did turn out to have many meaningrul things in common............our oldest children were in the same class at the high school, and we also had children in the same class at the middle school.............her middle child and my youngest did not match up...but no matter.............the notion that my children went to the city schools depsite our residence in the county was a topic of conversation in it's own right-......do you have to pay to send your kids to danville?......no, because they were grandfathered in..................at the time andrew would have gone to middle school from montesorri, most of his friends were going to the city schools......the statistics on high school-to-college advancement were compelling.....many more city kids went on to college.............and then there was the 'cultural diversity' question.................the faces in the city schools looked more like the real world.............while the makeup of county classes resembled the fading memory that i had of growing up in rural ohio................everyone was white, or shades of white..........and blacks were people you heard about on tv..........i had gone to school in an integrated system briefly in the 5th grade, but we had moved back to a purely white county with my dad's work by the 6th...........i never saw another person of color until i walked into the kitchen of mount carmel medical center in downtown columbus, ready to start work at a diet technician........code for kitchen skivvy..............anyway............we purposely sent our children to the integrated school.....despite warnings...............your child will be afraid to even go to the bathroom for fear of getting beat up or having his lunchmoney stolen.................yeah, right...................anyway..........back to lisa...................her daily dose of drama became tiresome........and her last catfight with joyce soured us on even considering retaining her.........but that brought up the question of gail...............she and lisa spoke on the phone before work every day,.......and after work every day....and during work every day.........if lisa quit, would gail quit, too?...............................